ALOS Symposium 2008

The 2008 Joint PI Symposium of the ALOS Data Nodes follows the First Symposium, held in 2007 in Kyoto, Japan. The event, organised by ESA in cooperation with JAXA, ASF, GA and GISTDA, will be held on the island of Rhodes, Greece, from 3 to 7 November 2008.

The Symposium will offer a forum to exchange views on technical and scientific issues on the data exploitation. It will provide updates of the satellite status and will allow to present the progress in recent research of ongoing projects.

The event is open to accepted PIs, Co-Is and representatives of the four ALOS Data Nodes and the Asian sub-node: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA); Alaska Satellite Facility of University of Alaska Fairbanks (ASF); Geoscience Australia (GA); Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA).

In the field of earth observation and distributing satellite imagery, Chelys has developed and provided ESA with a system that generates high resolution images in real time, MIRAVI. This has allowed ESA to take advantage of high resolution images as never before, making them available just a few minutes after the data reaches the Earth.

Using the same principle we developed a processor capable of generating AVNIR2 full resolution images in real-time starting from the raw data (Level0). The advantage is that the user can immediately access the high resolution image product before submitting an order to the ALOS PDS (through a system very similar to MIRAVI) and browse images from an online catalogue allowing users to make geographical or time based queries, etc.

As a result of the raw data processing we also generate Level0 and Level1 (radiometrically and geometrically corrected) products following the standards defined by ESA product specifications allowing the products to be potentially handled by any multimission facility. In the very near future, as soon as we finish the data validation phase, we will also produce a Level2 product based on reflectancies.